About this Project

This creature evokes the unfoldings of life's tapestry: a finite set of trajectories, made materially manifest by collapsing into being by arbitrary selection from an infinite sample space. Such mediation or manifestation processes are path-dependent and have a fortuitous component. The will of creation, the will of life, acquires, with this exercise, a better metaphor than studio art: visual works become analogues for individual biological beings, and the porousness and interdependence to other beings in both contexts is made more explicit. This work challenges common notions of identity and authorship, and even death itself. This exercise highlights the banality of entertaining visual works without a systemic feel for their peers. No living being came to be on its own or is not part of the woven fabric of life. Nothing ever comes from nowhere. No creation ever does. The role of the artist is that of a translator or mediator, and, to some extent, a good translator adapts form for it to be fertile in its context. Intentional design is replaced by intuitive, ever-evolving mutual interactions. This is a game of agency. (Mathematical) chaos arises. If DNA is biology's information record, what does a unit of information mean in a sympoietic (visual) art organism? Proximity in this artistic network, that is, inspiration, is clearly not merely visual. What is a visual informational unit? What would its role be in the evolution of such organisms? Self-referentiality is a likely outcome in organic (non-algorithmic) conditions, if a comparison with life aiming to self-perpetuate is valid. These seem like important questions in the times of generative AI. Can this tagged dependency network serve as a training set for a study of visual kinship as studied by visual complexity? Would such a framework be any relevant for these purposes? By then we'd, of course, then have to know what visual complexity is.

We said, “Let there be light”, and there was the first spark of autocatalytic ignition. In the beginning was the world, and the world was with us, and the world was us (Spinoza 1:1). Listen, this is how an artistic lab culture catalyzes itself, how one becomes two becomes four becomes a network blooming across the adjacency matrix of our panpsyche. It starts with a substrate (raw material, analog debris, digital fragments). You just need (at least) one seed, one B to meet your A, and suddenly you're not cultivating isolated Petris anymore, you're feeding a re-action that re-plicates, by do(cite). This is the sigmoid curve of co-creation: that slow induction period where nothing seems to happen, the patterns are small and the rate equations whisper low instead of shouting, but wait, wait until the exponential or power-law-like phase ignite, watch how one citation spawns two spawns four, or n-1, how the Jacobian matrix of our co-creative system suddenly has eigenvalues with positive real parts, unstable in the best possible way, growing, exploding outward through the strongly connected components of our holobiont until every node can (almostly) reach every other node, where the Laplacian hums with the flow of influence and the Fiedler value tells us “Yes, we are connected”, we therefore become one distributed reaction-diffusion system painting Turing patterns across the canvas of this community’s co-creativity. Then, we saw the light, and unfolded the spark into conservation and transformation. And afterall, here's the theorem that matters: nothing is lost, everything transforms. Remember the first law? If thermodynamics is working on our behalf, nobody can really do anything against us (Clausius 8:31). The stoichiometric matrix keeps the score: whatever enters must exit, changed, reconfigured, remixed into new morphologies, or end into the sinkhole of creativitylessness, period. This is conservation through collaboration, where your work becomes a substrate for mine and hence becomes a catalyst for theirs, transfer entropy between creators maps the hidden pathways, and Granger causality proves “Yes, you influenced me”, if your past can predict my future movements, our time series must be intertwined in the master equation of cultural evolution. We co-exist at multiple equilibria, simultaneously, bistable between states, phase-transitioning over basins of attraction, and that, that’s not chaos, perhaps catastrophe, or simply a richness, fulfilment through non-optimizing diversity that disentangles our mutuality, co-evolution. The spectral gap then determines how fast we synchronize, how quickly local fluctuations propagate through our coupling matrix, but we never fully sync because there’s let’s say, noise, a Langevin term, stochastic kicks from the Gillespie algorithm of individual choice keep us exploring this sympoietic phase space, until the cycle is finished the tension keep us dancing on the edge between order and disorder, between a settled fixed point and potentially strange attractors, contemplating what was and what could be, all of us holoentic critters in this sympocatalytic graph. There was the vine, we made the branches (Haraway 15:5).

As artists, we call for change to be loving. We believe that disruption comes when the bosom of expression meets innovation. Disruption is a dialectic; an engagement with artistic change that is based on a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of ideas, modes, and expressions. Disruption is sometimes necessary politically, personally, or communally. History moves us, our day to day lives move us, and as a community of artists we are moved by each other to disrupt, dream, and desire.

The organism cannot evolve without the dynamic interactions that animate its collective body. This project explores what it means to respond to, shape, and be shaped by an assemblage of others’ artistic expressions. Each contribution emerges from a shared space of exchange, where individual works intertwine, influence, and transform one another. The collective is not merely a gathering of pieces or artists; it is the generative force through which each piece comes into being.

We often say that to change anything, start everywhere. This sympoietic art organism is a collective reflection of relationships built on trust within the team and each contributing artist answering to themselves (and not needlessly heaping up tragedy in service of agendas), seeking power to create something from the commons (without authority). Each individual artefact persisted in an anarchic harmony and in reconciliation through constant change in the whole organism.

Magic is not mystery or trickery, it is the shimmer that appears when we are together, even across distance. In the sympoietic organism, every connection is a spell of attention, a way of feeling in common without touch. To create is to conjure, to transform shared time into something alive that binds and transforms with us. Magic lives in that invisible presence holding the collective, in the possibility of dreaming together while far apart.

- Patching ideas together - Open ended - Telling stories together - Collective imagination and shared dreaming - Free-associating - Automatic writing - Collective trance - Sowing/Sewing - Threading

Hybridization is a special power that requires tending and practice. As artists, hybridization is knowledge that what we make is always a combination of many fragments that do not always bear our names. It is something to look forward to, to work for, not a goal to achieve. In order to be hybrid, we must refuse fusion - because fusion means eradication of the self. Accept hybridization as a way to: - Share what cannot be formulated - Decenter yourself of the narrative - Open the flesh to the new and uncanny - Create wormholes in the common ground Change is a monstrous figure to praise, chaos is a romantic way to embrace otherness. MUTATE WITHOUT PROMISE (from ïan Larue’s analysis of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto)

- Release self-imposed constraints - Open your mind to joyful engagement - Nothing is in isolation

- Thoughts and feelings - Desires - Thinking outside the box - Unabashed - Community based and supported - Freeing